LoL.. im tim allen.. more power! But yes, good point. Not too much computing power is needed.. maybe. We don't know yet. Definitely going for the trade-off between power and power consumption is good..
Why use a laptop?
Ok, yes laptops are designed to consume less power, and they are just as powerful as their desktop counterparts.. but we need to communicate with all the sensors and electrical equipment. If someone can figure out how to do all that with a laptop then lets use one.. otherwise we should probably go for easy expansion, etc..
Now maybe if all our electrical devices ran off USB..
Hmm.. maybe the laptop can communicate with some box that gathers all the data from the devices.. not sure.
Flash drives.. yeah, no hard drives. Or we load everything from flash and use a large ramdisk to store temp data... although we should have some kind of logging function so we know what went wrong during testing.. unless by some miracle we get it right the first time.